I hopped on a train recently to visit a friend who left her staff job a few years ago to have kids. Now that she's about to go back to work full-time, she's thinking -- as anyone familiar with the state of the field would be -- of dumping arts journalism for something else.
We meant to talk lots and lots about that. But we fell into a conversation about what a blast it is writing about theater. Sat there in a park on the edge of her city's downtown, gazing at the skyline, and talked until we were sunburned about how much we love it. Completely unexpected. (The sunburn, yes, but the passion, too.)
The grim present entered the conversation when we tried to think of publications that are taking arts coverage seriously enough to allow her the chance to do the kind of writing she used to do not so long ago. Which left me wondering: Is finding joy in our work largely a thing of the past? Presumably that's a huge part of what propelled most of us into arts journalism in the first place; it certainly wasn't the money or the newsroom prestige.
I'm lucky enough to have a job that allows me to get the high I've always gotten from engaging intensely with the arts, in my own writing and in working with writers. But is that feeling just a memory for many of us? And what about the young arts journalists?
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